Is your business ready to maximise sales this festive season?

In his latest blog, Todd Linden CEO, Payment Processing, North America, explains the anatomy of a successful sales conversion over the Christmas shopping period.

With Black Friday, Singles Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas all just around the corner, you need to ensure your business has everything in place now if you want to maximize sales in this last and busiest quarter of the year.

You’ll need to be able to offer customers a hassle-free intuitive way to pay, both in-store and online to fully benefit from the festive season. What’s more, you must be able to handle cross-border payments if you want to take advantage of the growing number of consumers around the world shopping on overseas websites to bag a bargain.

Getting all these payment challenges right is a must if you want to be a hit with customers this Christmas, and successfully convert consumer interest in your products into sales.

So, how can retailers build a successful conversion operation when it comes to in-store and online payments at this busy time of year? How do you handle the volume of payments successfully to ensure no shopping basket is left abandoned at the check-out?

Your PSP is here to help you achieve these goals and have the perfect festive sales period – you just need to work with it to make sure you’re prepared for all eventualities. Here are a few questions you should be asking your PSP to ensure you have all your bases covered:

Can you handle spikes in volume?

No business’s sales volume remains constant – everyone has spikes in customer activity when both their online and bricks-and-mortar channels need to handle more transactions than they would on a normal day.

Failure to handle these upticks in payments can have negative implications for your business – any delay in processing the transaction could lead to customers abandoning their shopping, resulting in lost sales, impacting on your performance in the peak of the shopping calendar.

To prevent any delays, then, you should talk to your PSP’s support team now to make sure your online and offline payment systems have the capacity to meet your sales forecasts. Paysafe’s technical support team, for example, is always there to help merchants prepare their systems to make sure they can cope with any sales rush.

Can you support with cross-border payments?

If you’re expecting your eCommerce channels to serve customers around the world this festive season, you need to ensure your payment systems are capable of securely processing international payments. On top of this, you need to be confident that your platform’s payment systems are capable of meeting local payment needs – UK or US customers, for instance, are happy making card payments, but Chinese consumers favor eWallets, while German shoppers like to opt for invoicing.

You should ask your PSP if it not only offers a range of global payment solutions, but is capable of processing payments in multiple local currencies – Paysafe for example supports merchants with solutions that offer eWallet transactions, as well as card payments. We also offer direct bank transfer payments by Rapid Transfer for faster settlements, and a Pay Later invoicing option for DACH retailers.

Don’t forget to ask your provider if it offers risk management support – this will help give you confidence that your business is protected from fraud.

What do you offer to streamline the payments process for consumers?

Key to a streamlined payments process for consumers is to make the transaction authorization procedure as seamless as possible – all while ensuring optimum security. This is particularly true for eCommerce transactions. No one wants a lengthy and confusing purchase experience when shopping online – any delay in processing the transaction, and consumers will simply drop their shopping and go elsewhere.

Talk to your PSP about the different authorization options they offer to take the pain out of transaction verification. Paysafe, for example, provides a tokenization solution, which encrypts credit card data to enable your returning customers to make easy one-click payments time and time again without worrying about security.

Making the festive season a merry one!

The fourth quarter of the year is arguably the most important time in the global retailer calendar. If you want to make the most of the spike in consumer spending, you need to make sure the payment process on all of your channels is as smooth as possible.

By talking to your PSP now, you can ensure you’re fully prepared for all eventualities, so you can rest assured your customers will have the kind of seamless, pain-free user experience they expect from your store.